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“A woman does not become interesting until she is over 40,” Coco Chanel once said.
So, after the huge response to our list of Hottest Actors Over 50, AARP’s Movies for Grownups is turning the spotlight to Hollywood’s Most Fabulous Women Over 50 — more than two dozen remarkable talents in their 50s to 90s who demonstrate that age isn’t a hurdle; it’s an upgrade.
Leading the brigade is 9-1-1 star Angela Bassett, praised by The New Yorker for her “innate strength, diamond-sharp beauty, and depth of feeling.”
Bassett herself carries that grace lightly. As she told AARP recently, she refuses to let age define her: “Half the time, I forget how old I am! Just keep putting one foot in front of the other, keep embracing life, and know that the best is yet to come.”
Her colleagues echo the reverence. Says her Black Panther: Wakanda Forever director, Ryan Coogler, “Everybody loves Angela.… She’s a national treasure, know what I mean? She’s so incredible that sometimes you forget.… Her work ethic is insane.”
Another case in point: former Baywatch bombshell Pamela Anderson, 58, who stunned the fashion world two years ago by daring to do the unthinkable — arrive at Paris Fashion Week without a trace of makeup and look radiant doing it.
“With so many pressures and postures,” Jamie Lee Curtis, 67 (and also on our list), wrote on Instagram, “[Anderson] showed up and claimed her seat at the table with nothing on her face. I am so impressed and floored by this act of courage and rebellion.”
Curtis has earned her own praise for challenging ageism and the pressures women face, having, as The Guardian notes, “become someone who appears to operate outside the usual Hollywood rules.”
Another quality of being fabulous is knowing it’s not a solo act, it’s a sisterhood. Two of our picks — Naomi Watts, 57, and Nicole Kidman, 58 — have been devoted friends for more than 40 years. These women don’t compete; they collaborate and cheer each other on.
And then there’s June Squibb, 96 — living proof that a late bloom can be the brightest. After six decades in the business, she earned her first Oscar nomination at 84 for Nebraska and scored her first leading role in 2024’s Thelma. As one New York critic quipped, “There are 70-year-olds who want to be like June Squibb when they grow up.”
Women of every age could take a cue from screen icon Sophia Loren, 91, who understood the power of experience long before it was fashionable. “There is a fountain of youth,” she wrote in her 1984 book Women & Beauty as she turned 50. “It is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life.… When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.”
These women are not in their “second act,” they are in their truest act — bold, wise, stylish, powerful and luminous in ways youth can’t imitate.
What could be more fabulous than that?
MEET THE FAB 25No. 1No. 2No. 3No. 4No. 5No. 6No. 7No. 8No. 9No. 10No. 11No. 12No. 13No. 14No. 15No. 16No. 17No. 18No. 19No. 20No. 21No. 22No. 23No. 24No. 25About Movies for GrownupsAngela Bassett Tops ‘Most Fabulous Women Over 50’ ListAt 67, the actress is one of AARP’s Movies for Grownups 25 Most Fabulous Women Over 50 and talks about embracing life with a positive attitude.Play Video
No. 1
Angela Bassett, 67
Iconic
Angela Bassett’s volcanic performance as Tina Turner in What’s Love Got to Do With It earned her a Golden Globe, an Oscar nomination and instant icon status. It also cemented her gift for portraying real-life women with force and dignity. She brought emotional fire to Betty Shabazz in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, strength to Katherine Jackson in The Jacksons: An American Dream and quiet power to the titular civil rights activist in The Rosa Parks Story.
“If you’re lucky,” she tells AARP, “your work touches others and you can make an impact.”
In 2023 Bassett made Hollywood history as the first actor Oscar-nominated for a role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, thanks to her commanding Queen Ramonda in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. She can embody these powerhouse roles, she says, because she takes the time to cultivate — and fiercely protect — her own inner strength. She needs it for her high-octane role as LAPD patrol sergeant Athena Grant in the hit series 9-1-1, now in its ninth season.
No. 2
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Naomi Watts, 57
Bestie
We’ve admired Naomi Watts’ talent for decades — ever since witnessing the raw ache of her character in 21 Grams and the psychological tightrope she walked in Mulholland Drive. But today we love her just as much for the person she is off-screen: the best friend women wish they had. The actor speaks openly about menopause and aging as empowerment, not decline, and even launched Stripes, a skin-care and wellness company devoted to supporting women through the hormonal shifts of midlife.
“I love being in my 50s,” she tells AARP. “We get to know ourselves better … and we can stop the people-pleasing. There’s no need to give a f--- what everyone else thinks. We can let go of the coulda, shoulda, wouldas and go after what we want — unapologetically.”
Watts’ new Hulu series, All’s Fair, follows a group of female divorce attorneys (costars include Glenn Close, Sarah Paulson and Kim Kardashian) who leave a male-dominated firm to build their own — and Watts embraces that sisterhood message in her real life as well. “I feel especially grateful now for the deep friendships I have with remarkable women,” she says. “We’ve grown up together, through thick and thin. Community is everything.”
No. 3
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June Squibb, 96
Dynamo
According to June Squibb, fabulousness begins with self-knowledge: “It’s knowing what is special about you — how you are different from any other woman.” She’s lived that truth. For decades Squibb worked steadily — Broadway, regional theater, commercials, memorable bit parts in big films like Scent of a Woman and The Age of Innocence — before everything changed at 84 with Alexander Payne’s Nebraska. Her salty, scene-stealing turn as Bruce Dern’s wife earned her an Oscar nod — and instantly transformed this longtime character actor into everyone's crush.
Then, at 94, Squibb landed her first-ever leading film role in the action-comedy Thelma, earning rave reviews and proving she isn’t a late bloomer — she’s a rocket. “I am grateful for the fact that I am still working,” she tells AARP.
How does this dynamo keep going strong at a pace that would leave someone half her age breathless?
“I take a Pilates class once a week,” says Squibb. “I do four Pilates stretches every morning. I try not to eat too crazy. I must get my sleep — nine to 10 hours a night.”
And even in her blazing cultural moment, she keeps it humble.
“I am absolutely blown away after being told I am on AARP’s list of Hollywood’s Most Fabulous Women Over 50,” she says. “I consider it a great honor.” Squibb is nominated for a Movies for Grownups best actress award this year for her most recent performance, in Eleanor the Great, directed by Scarlett Johansson.
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No. 4
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Jamie Lee Curtis, 67
Rebel
Once known as Hollywood’s favorite scream queen (Halloween, Prom Night, et al.), Jamie Lee Curtis has spent the past four decades proving she’s nobody’s typecast. A true rebel, she showcased knockout comedic instincts in Trading Places, A Fish Called Wanda and True Lies — winning a Golden Globe and cementing herself as one of Hollywood’s most versatile performers. From Freaky Friday to the cult hit Knives Out, Curtis has built a singular filmography and refuses to play by anyone’s rules but her own.
Her boldest act of rebellion arrived with Everything Everywhere All at Once, where she embraced an unfiltered, unglamorous role that earned her the Academy Award for best supporting actress in 2023.
What powers her current era is radical honesty. Curtis speaks openly about sobriety, aging, identity and body image, challenging Hollywood’s expectations at every turn. “I wouldn’t want to be any other age,” she tells AARP. “I look better, think better, move better than I did in my youth.”
And she’s leaning in. “The bouquet of opportunities to create deep and complex characters only arrived when I had a sense of my own complicated nature and mind,” says Curtis. “The freedom of the mind is the goal, and I feel liberated and free as a bird.”
Curtis received Movies for Grownups’ highest honor, the annual career achievement award, in 2023.
No. 5
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Andie MacDowell, 67
True Beauty
What makes a woman fabulous? “That’s a complex and beautiful question,” Andie MacDowell tells AARP. “Women are unique and capable at every level. We can be fabulous as mothers, artists, leaders, coworkers, taskmasters. There is nothing cliché about fabulous women.”
MacDowell exploded into the spotlight as a top model for Calvin Klein and L’Oréal. Then came her movie breakthrough in Sex, Lies, and Videotape and the pop-culture classics Groundhog Day and Four Weddings and a Funeral.
After decades of steady work, she delivered a stunning reinvention in Netflix’s Maid as a bipolar mother, acting opposite her real-life daughter Margaret Qualley.
But the former supermodel’s off-screen choices proved just as transformative. When MacDowell stopped coloring her hair during the pandemic and strutted red carpets with a striking silver mane, that choice became her “superpower,” Good Housekeeping heralded — and she emerged as a symbol of age-positive beauty.
Still, she prefers to focus on what’s happening inside.
“Your 60s are about turning inward, reflecting and learning who you truly are,” she says. “I’m finally getting things right.… I think the greatest asset of growing older is the deep reflecting you do on the necessity of loving your family and your friends.”
No. 6
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Michelle Yeoh, 63
Joyful
Michelle Yeoh has spent her career saying yes to the next leap — whether performing her own stunts in Hong Kong action films or headlining the genre-bending Everything Everywhere All at Once, which made her the first Asian woman to win the Academy Award for best actress.
Last month, Yeoh reprised her Wicked role as the charming but sinister Madam Morrible in Wicked: For Good.
So, what makes a woman fabulous? “For me, being fabulous means living fully,” she tells AARP. “It’s when you keep saying yes to life … with curiosity, compassion and courage.” Age? She doesn’t bother with numbers. “I just think about being alive and engaged in the moment,” she says.
That joy is her engine. “It’s movement and stillness, strength and softness,” she says. “I exercise, meditate, go outdoors and enjoy a delicious meal with a glass of wine, with good laughter, with the company I love.”
Work is fuel too: “Being surrounded by passionate, creative people keeps me wanting to make more meaningful films.”
Her favorite part of this chapter? Clarity. “You start to understand what truly matters: … the people, the moments and the purpose.” Every triumph, every scar, every joy has brought her here. “Life becomes more meaningful when you stop counting the years and start valuing the journey.”
Yeoh won best actress at the Movies for Grownups Awards in 2023.
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No. 7
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Demi Moore, 63
Triumphant
After Ghost turned Demi Moore into a global phenomenon, she ruled the ’90s with A Few Good Men and Indecent Proposal. Then came Striptease, the landmark deal that made her the highest-paid female actor in Hollywood. “That moment was so powerful for me because it wasn’t just about me; it was about changing the playing field for all women,” she later reflected in Variety.
But the tide shifted. Box office stumbles, gleeful tabloid takedowns and an industry eager to push her off her pedestal followed.
Moore didn’t break — she rebuilt. She stepped out of the spotlight, stitched her life back together, wrote a best-selling memoir and returned with fire in her chest. Her 2025 Movies for Grownups best actress and Golden Globe wins for The Substance — a feminist body-horror film about a woman clawing back lost youth — felt like vindication wrapped in rage and artistry.
“Thirty years ago, I had a producer tell me I was a ‘popcorn actress,’ ” she said in her Golden Globes acceptance speech. “And I believed that. And that corroded me over time.”
Not anymore. Today she’s got a major role on the successful series Landman, and she stays strong as she helps care for her ex-husband Bruce Willis, who has frontotemporal dementia.
No. 8
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Cate Blanchett, 56
Transcendent
Cate Blanchett’s most daring film roles have helped expand the cultural conversation around gender, sex and power.
Her acclaimed turn in I’m Not There, in which she played an androgynous incarnation of Bob Dylan, shattered boundaries; she embodied a male icon through a distinctly feminine lens. In Carol, Blanchett’s role as a gay woman resisting the rigid gender and sexual norms of the 1950s resonated deeply with LGBTQ+ audiences. And in Tár she portrayed a world-class conductor, a woman in a historically male-dominated power seat.
Blanchett launched a college program in 2023 to support films that promote the perspectives of women and trans and nonbinary people. “I don’t think about my gender or my sexuality,” she told Vanity Fair. “For me in school, it was David Bowie, it was Annie Lennox. There’s always been that sort of gender fluidity.”
That fluidity also shapes her creative ethos — she sees the fight for gender equality as an artistic duty.
“It’s not just women; it’s also men,” she says. “Our job is, yes, to be creative, but one of our primary jobs as artists is to be fearless.”
No. 9
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Pamela Anderson, 58
Truth Teller
Pamela Anderson’s story has always been public — but only recently has it become self-authored. In the ’90s, the Playboy Playmate, Baywatch beauty and rock star’s wife was easy tabloid prey and seldom taken seriously as an actor.
She did an about-face to remedy that in 2023 when she starred as Roxie Hart in Chicago on Broadway and got a standing ovation on her opening night. That same year she released a best-selling memoir, Love, Pamela, and appeared in the Netflix documentary Pamela, a Love Story.
“I feel like this is the first opportunity when I’ve been able to say, ‘Well, this is how I did it. I don’t know how you would’ve done it, but this is the way I survived it all, and with a smile,’ ” she told Vogue. “Even though there have been hard times, it will work out.”
Then came her boldest act yet: a moment of radical simplicity. Appearing bare-faced at Paris Fashion Week in 2023, Anderson became an unexpected activist for female truth — encouraging women to show the world their real faces and to stop feeling the need to mask themselves.
“I feel the happiest I’ve ever been in my own skin,” Anderson has said. “It’s all about self-acceptance.”
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No. 10
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Salma Hayek, 59
Unstoppable
Salma Hayek has spent her career blowing past expectations, becoming one of the first Latina actors to claim real power in Hollywood. When the former Mexican telenovela star first arrived in Los Angeles, executives told her flat out: “You’ll never make it in this town.… You’ll only play a prostitute, drug dealer, wife or girlfriend, and housekeeper,” she said on The Drew Barrymore Show.
She proved them wrong almost immediately.
Her breakout performance in Desperado turned her into a star, but the earthquake moment was Frida, the passion project she fought to produce and headline. As iconic Mexican painter Frida Kahlo — a bisexual, unibrowed, political artist — Hayek earned an Oscar nomination and established herself as a force both in front of and behind the camera.
Since then, she’s pushed in every direction — comedies, action films, even Marvel blockbusters — expanding the lanes available to women over 50, especially Latinas. And as an executive producer of Ugly Betty, she helped bring more authentic Latino representation to TV.
“There are more opportunities now … and that’s good,” she tells AARP. “But they’re still segregated in boxes.… I wish we could find a space where people feel, ‘My voice has to do with you, and your voice has to do with me.’ ”
No. 11
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Halle Berry, 59
Resilient
Halle Berry’s career reached a historic peak in 2002, when she won the best actress Oscar for Monster’s Ball, becoming the first (and still only) Black woman to hold that honor.
She kept the momentum going with the X-Men franchise, Die Another Day and John Wick: Chapter 3. Then, in 2020, the actor stepped behind the camera for her directorial debut: Bruised, an MMA drama with an abusive-boyfriend subplot that echoes issues she’s long fought off-screen.
Berry’s most meaningful activism centers on supporting survivors of domestic violence, shaped by watching her mother endure abuse and surviving an abusive relationship herself.
“This story was a world I knew,” she told AARP. “As a kid, I saw my mother beaten up and I know the horror and helplessness a kid feels.”
For more than 20 years the actor has partnered with the Jenesse Center in Los Angeles — raising funds, fighting stigma, volunteering, and creating transitional housing for women and children escaping violence.
This year Berry refocused her wellness website, re-spin.com, as a resource for women’s midlife health, including menopause. “I thought, What deserves a respin more than menopause?” she asks. “Nothing. I mean, menopause was never spun in the first place.”
No. 12
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Sandra Bullock, 61
Humanitarian
Sandra Bullock became America’s sweetheart with Speed, While You Were Sleeping and Miss Congeniality — showcasing her warmth, wit, and effortless, everywoman charm. Then she blew past the cute-rom-com-lead box, winning an Oscar for The Blind Side, earning a nomination for Gravity, and headlining hits like The Heat and Ocean’s 8 while producing her own films.
Off-screen, Bullock is one of Hollywood’s most quietly formidable humanitarians. She has donated millions to the American Red Cross — after 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Harvey — and her long-term support of New Orleans’ Warren Easton Charter High School remains one of her most lasting contributions. “There are no politics in 8 feet of water,” she told People after Hurricane Harvey. “There are human beings in 8 feet of water.”
And when fire — not water — devastated communities, she showed up again, giving $400,000 to California wildfire relief. “The untold destruction from these fires is heartbreaking,” she said. “I’m glad to be able to help. We’re all family in this.”
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No. 13
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Viola Davis, 60
Survivor
Long before Viola Davis earned the Triple Crown of Acting — as the first Black woman to win the Oscar, Emmy and Tony trifecta — she understood what it meant to survive. Her breakthrough performance in Doubt (in one searing scene with Meryl Streep) signaled an actor whose power came from lived truth, and in The Help, Fences (for which she won Movies for Grownups’ best supporting actress award in 2017) and The Woman King she continued to play women who bend, endure, but never break. Davis has spoken openly about growing up in poverty and violence and tells AARP: “What comes with poverty is invisibility.”
Her work on-screen and off insists on the opposite: that every woman deserves to be seen. Davis is committed to breaking the cycles she survived — fighting childhood hunger, expanding arts programs for underserved kids, and advocating for civil rights and criminal justice reform.
In her memoir, Finding Me, the actor shares the wounds of her past and the resilience that shaped her, offering women a road map for reclaiming their own worth.
“I want to make everyone who comes in contact with me feel they’re worthy,” she says.
No. 14
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Meryl Streep, 76
Mastery
For nearly five decades, the luminous Meryl Streep has been Hollywood’s gold standard — the actor everyone else measures themselves against. With landmark performances in Sophie’s Choice, Kramer vs. Kramer, The Devil Wears Prada and The Iron Lady, Streep doesn’t just play characters; she vanishes into them. Her uncanny accents and ability to slip between comedy and tragedy in the blink of an eye changed the expectations for what women — and actors, period — could do on-screen.
But Streep’s mastery isn’t limited to the roles that have made her an Oscar nominee a record-setting 21 times. Behind the scenes, she has become an engine for other artists, funding scholarships, arts-education programs and organizations that champion women through her Silver Mountain Foundation for the Arts.
Most notably, she helped launch the Writers Lab, the first program in the world devoted to developing screenplays by women over 40 — a demographic Hollywood has historically ignored.
“We’ve entered a new time of possibility for women,” she told Vanity Fair. “There is a vital, interesting place for them on-screen, into middle and older age.”
No. 15
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Jean Smart, 74
Comedian
Jean Smart has a gift for making us laugh — and these days, that feels essential.
After charming audiences as sharp-tongued Charlene on Designing Women, she blasted into a second act with other knockout TV roles: the cool, caustic Agent Laurie Blake in Watchmen; the stubborn, grieving grandmother in Mare of Easttown; and — her defining triumph — the razor-witted comedy icon Deborah Vance in Hacks, a role that earned her a Movies for Grownups best TV actress award and four Emmys, and cemented her as Hollywood’s queen of the late-career comeback.
Smart knows better than anyone why humor matters. Her husband died during Hacks production and she filmed a funeral scene just days later. “I was a wreck, but it actually turned out to be very funny,” she told The New Yorker. It’s the kind of moment only Smart could alchemize, proving that comedy doesn’t just entertain — it cracks open grief and lets the light in.
As she told Yahoo Life: “Laughter is the best medicine.”
No. 16
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Nicole Kidman, 58
Advocate
Nicole Kidman has long gravitated toward roles that reveal the inner battles women fight, exploring the morally complicated satire of To Die For, grief in Rabbit Hole and an Oscar-winning portrayal of Virginia Woolf in The Hours.
In the months leading up to her 50th birthday, Kidman began shooting Big Little Lies, taking on a role that definined a shift for her — artistically and socially — by shedding light on domestic violence and prompting vital conversations about the issue.
That on-screen advocacy mirrors her real-life mission. As a UN Women Goodwill Ambassador for more than a decade, Kidman champions global initiatives that support survivors, strengthen legal protections and challenge the stigma surrounding intimate partner violence.
“Everyone has a role to play and power to contribute to ending violence against women and girls,” she wrote in The Guardian.
Kidman won the Movies for Grownups best actress award for Being the Ricardos in 2022.
No. 17
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Kate Winslet, 50
Unfiltered
Kate Winslet has spent three decades choosing roles that refuse to lie about who women really are. She rocketed to global stardom as the willful Rose in Titanic — and instead of becoming Hollywood’s next doe-eyed ingenue, built a career playing unvarnished characters in films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Little Children, Revolutionary Road and (in an Oscar-winning turn) The Reader.
Just as defining is her long, public pushback against Hollywood’s beauty expectations. She has rejected the retouching of her photos for years, saying, “The retouching is excessive. I do not look like that and, more importantly, I don’t desire to look like that.” As she moved into her 40s and 50s, Winslet became even more outspoken about the value of faces — and bodies — that reflect real life. “Faces that change, that move, are beautiful,” she told The New York Times. “We’ve stopped learning how to love those faces because we keep covering them up with filters.”
That philosophy crystallized in Mare of Easttown, where Winslet insisted her Pennsylvania detective character look like an actual middle-aged woman — no smoothing, no flattering lighting, no edits.
“She’s a fully functioning, flawed woman,” Winslet said of her character, “with a body and a face that moves in a way that is synonymous with her age and her life.”
No. 18
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Julia Louis-Dreyfus, 64
Jokester
In the early ’80s, Julia Louis-Dreyfus made her debut at just 21 on Saturday Night Live, becoming the youngest woman cast member in the show’s history. She went on to reshape television comedy as Elaine Benes on Seinfeld, giving a performance fully equal to (if not funnier than) her male costars. Her run in The New Adventures of Old Christine and her acclaimed, Emmy-laden work on Veep further affirmed that a woman could anchor a show and raise the comedic bar every decade.
“There’s more opportunity for women in comedic roles than 20 or 30 years ago,” she told Time magazine. “More roles that are not just the wife … or the girlfriend.”
Today, she continues that evolution. Through her celebrated podcast Wiser Than Me, Louis-Dreyfus highlights women over 70 because, she tells AARP, “older women are less visible in our culture. We’re trying to change that narrative.”
Away from work, she mentors younger performers to take risks and embrace the kind of boundary-pushing comedy she learned from her own heroes: Lucille Ball, Mary Tyler Moore and Madeline Kahn. As she told Variety, “I’ve always admired women who are not afraid of making themselves look bad or foolish to get a laugh.” The article continues at https://www.aarp.org/entertainment/movies-for-grownups/most-fabulous-wo…
By Natasha Stoynoff,
AARPPublished December 09, 2025
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